The present invention relates in general to the field of computers and similar technologies, and in particular to software utilized in this field.
One technique for managing multiple configuration items (hereinafter referred to as “resources”) in a computing environment is through the use of a Configuration Management Database (or “CMDB”). Generally speaking, such a resource may be hardware and/or software entity within a computing environment. Examples of such resources include, without limitation, switches, routers, printers, storage devices, computer systems, software applications, and application packages.
Along with representing and storing relationships between resources, one purpose of the CMDB is to provide a correlation mechanism between resources. For example, two management products may discover a single computer system and yet call the single computer system different names. Thus, it is important to represent this single computer system as a single resource within the CMDB. In order to foster consistent identification of resources in the CMDB, a CMDB Common Data Model (“CDM”) formally defines the ways in which each type (or class) of resource is identified through the use of naming rules. These rules list the potential attributes that provide identifying characteristics, the combination of those attributes that are needed to identify the resource, and what the context is that makes that combination unique. For example, there might be a rule that says that combining “Manufacturer,” “MachineType,” “Model,” and “SerialNumber” give a unique identification of a computer system. For some types of resources, a simple combination of attributes is not sufficient to uniquely identify a resource without some other context. For example, the drive letter (e.g., “C:”) of a logical disk is not sufficient to give a unique identification without further context. However, such a drive letter is unique within the context of an Operating System instance.
While such rules may uniquely identify the resources, the rules do not always produce user-friendly names for the resources. For instance, where a rule states that the “Manufacturer,” “MachineType,” “Model,” and “SerialNumber” of a computer system could be combined to produce a unique name for the computer system, the resulting name may not be convenient for users to work with. That is, a name generated according to the aforementioned rule may be substantially lengthy in nature, making it inconvenient for users to utilize it for operations involving the computer system. Furthermore, such a generated name may not be intuitive to users, as they may not know the model type or serial number of the computer system without consulting reference material for the computer system. As such, users may be allowed to assign a user-specific name (also referred to herein as an “alias”) to a resource. However, as different users may assign different aliases to the same resource, this may create confusion when the users communicate regarding the resource. For instance, a first user may refer to a computer system using the alias “ws1par1” while a second user may refer to the same computer system using the alias “websphere1.” If the first user then asks the second user to perform an operation on “ws1par1”, the second user may be confused as to which computer system the first user is referring to.